If you have an offending network that does not respond to abuse/complaints, your best course of action is to no longer communicate with that network. That is your own choice as an end-user/network operator. Complaining to their upstream or transit provider will only get them to switch providers. The traffic will continue. An alternative solution as you mentioned, involves some laywers, and attempt to recover compensation for the damages. Good luck with that one though. From the looks of it, you'll spend more money in court than you would have just blocking them. We can't force other networks to "play nice". As we all know, the Internet is an open network. Protect yourself, and make sure you are not one of the internet scum sending out this stuff, but don't depend on others to play nice with you. Transit providers should not be CONTENT filtering their customers (for free anyways, I'm all for selling security services). This does not mean they have no responsibility to keep a proper abuse/security staff. If a transit provider has a customer who is constantly infecting/spamming/etc and fails to act, by all means take action and drop the customer. My main point is, if we depend on our transit providers to act as Internet nannies, we are promoting poor end-user network management. --- Andy Roger Marquis wrote:
How is this different from a transit provider allowing their network to be used for spam? Seems the same hands-off argument was made wrt spam a decade ago but has since proved unsustainable.
Our particular problem is with an ISP in Wisconsin, NETNET-WAN. We get tens of thousands of scans to netbios ports every day from their /19. This is several orders of magnitude more netbios than we see from the rest of the net combined. It's eating nontrivial bandwidth and cpu that we pay real money for. They've had our logs for months but seem incapable of doing anything about their infected customers. The suits recommend documenting time and bandwidth costs and sending a bill with a cease and desist request.
My question is not what can we do about bots, we already filter these worst case networks, but what can we do to make it worthwhile for bot-providers like NETNET to police their own networks without involving lawyers?